by Malka Older
She’s not even sure she’ll have access to Information or comms once she’s over there. She pings Ken with her location, then steps into the woods.
* * *
Ken stares at the message from Mishima. Switzerland? Really? He glances at the clock: 12:38. If she hasn’t contacted him by noon, he’s going after her. In the meantime, he’s going to do everything he can from here. He’s already sent the feed reference of the runner to a couple of apex news compilers, and he goes back to track through the vids of the table again, searching for the moment when the bomb was placed.
* * *
Mishima steps carefully, knife in hand, glaring into the shadows behind each trunk she passes. Nobody leaps out at her, although the chills never stop creeping across her shoulders. Fortunately, the pine belt is brief; it is only a few minutes’ walk before the darkness lightens and she sees the deep blue of sky ahead of her. A moment later she steps out from the trees. She is at the top of a steep slope covered in grass; at the base, maybe twenty feet below her, the curve of a road in the darkness. No streetlights; Switzerland has been hit hard by trade imbalances and is, as far as her intel goes, short on energy. If she had known she was coming here, she would have brought her knowledge of the country up to date a little. She checks and Information is still there, but she doesn’t bother to look anything up now; she needs to focus on the physical and the present.
Mishima starts down the slope, wondering if anyone is watching her precarious descent. And if not, where has her quarry gone? Was there a car waiting? There is no sign of brake lights on the road in either direction, but with her slow progress through the woods, the bomber could have had quite a head start. She jogs down the last part of the hill and looks around. There might be Information, but there are no feeds, or at least none available to her. If she remembers correctly, the Swiss government does employ cameras, but their use is limited to police and government powers.
She blinks to look for them, thinking that maybe she can find a way to hack into the Swiss police vid monitoring system (how sophisticated can they really be? This is Switzerland), and Information isn’t there. Between the top of the slope and here, she has fallen out of range. Mishima fights a rare moment of panic. It’s like that first underwater breath in a dive, when you have to convince your body that the oxygenizer will keep you alive in this foreign element as long as you keep your teeth clamped on it. She wants to run back up the hill to find out everything she could possibly need, and maybe bring Ken in on a live comms link for a while. Instead, she breathes deep and easy, shutting off everything but her stored data to avoid the temptation to check every few seconds whether she’s back in signal or not. She starts down the road, following the curve that takes her away from the border.
Geneva might have been sunny and pleasant during the day, but at night altitude tells, and the forsaken Swiss countryside Mishima is running through is bitingly cold. On the other hand, sound travels easily in the chilled air. Mishima hears the car long before she sees it. It’s an old-fashioned motor, growling through the darkness with a steady thrum. She has to look hard for the source in the shadow and noir of the unlit countryside, and it is several minutes before she is sure that it is coming from behind her and not ahead. She realizes at the same time why she didn’t see it: the car is running without lights, a darker patch crawling along the pitch-black tarmac. The only reason she can figure for driving without headlights on an unlit mountain road is pursuit. Mishima scurries over the shoulder and crouches out of sight. She listens to the throb of the engine get louder and more intricate, and risks a glance when she estimates it has just passed her. Yes, an old car, an ancient Renault or something of the sort, not moving much faster than she can run, the interior invisible in the night. She pulls her head back down and waits, but five seconds later, the sound of the engine slows, then shifts. The car is idling just down the road. Then a door clicks and swings open.
“You might as well come out.” Even through her interpreter, the voice has a rustic twang; the French spoken here clings to forms and syntax popular several decades ago. “I’ve got you covered, and there’s nowhere to go, anyway.”
She should have figured that a car running without lights would have been refitted with infrared or sonar. Mishima considers her options. She is fairly certain she can outrun the guy, but it would mean leaving the road, and she could too easily get lost. She has no leads and no Information, and she doesn’t have a lot of time if she’s going to find the bomber and be back before Kei is missed.
She raises her hands above her head and stands as though it’s part of a tai chi exercise to see how long one motion can take. She can see the figure now, dark beside the larger lump of the vehicle.
“Keep your hands up and come on over here.” As she approaches, the man takes her wrists down and slaps elasties on them behind her back. His hands are small and uncallused but strong enough. He doesn’t twist her shoulders any more than he has to, and the elastie is competently applied. A cop, she thinks; a conscientious rural cop who doesn’t see much action. Once she is restrained, he removes her large knife from her boot. That’s a blow, but of course he would have seen it on a body scanner. Her stiletto stays tucked against her skin, all but invisible any way you look. He guides her to the backseat of the car, a Renault as she guessed, something from the turn of the century or not long after, snaps on the clips for the protective crash web, shuts the door after her without ceremony, and walks unhurried around to the front.
“Now,” he says, turning the key (an actual key!) in the ignition. “Sorry for the inconvenience, and we’ll get this straightened out again as soon as possible if it’s a mistake, but you were hiding from law enforcement and armed. And unless I’m much mistaken, you’re not from around here.” Mishima sees a flash of his eyes in the rearview mirror as he flicks on the headlights.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” she says, keeping her voice low and on the calm side of conversational. She catches his frown as he glances in the mirror again. Confidence is everything here, and she feeds hers on the fact that he looks no more than twenty-five. Young males aren’t normally her captors of choice, but given how polite and unaggressive this one has been so far, his inexperience may be a plus.
“And why is that?”
“Because the person you’re looking for is still out there.”
“And who would that be?” But he’s switched the lights off again. On his dashboard she can see the corner of the monitor showing a combination of infrared and long-range scanner, mountains and trees in red, orange, and white.
“I assume you’re looking for the person who bombed a café in Répub—in Geneva an hour ago. Feeds make it clear that person was heading for the border back there where the road curves.” Although come to think of it, she has seen no actual evidence that this person crossed the border. She makes a mental note to go back to other surrounding feeds if this gambit doesn’t work. If she ever gets back on Information. “I suppose the embassy asked you to take a look.”
“That all sounds like something the bomber would have thought through very carefully,” the cop says. He’s keeping his voice conversational, too.
“If you’ve seen the vids, you know that I don’t match the description of the suspect,” Mishima goes on. “I don’t mind spending some time tied up in the back of a cop car”—in fact, she can think of some distinct opportunities in this situation—“but”—and here she tweaks the admonishing factor in her voice up ever so slightly—“I will be upset if we miss out on capturing the actual perp because of it.”
“We?” he asks, eyes meeting hers in the mirror again. He’s still moving forward but just as slowly as when he was following her, and Mishima is itching to tell him to step on it; if the bomber was met by someone in a vehicle, they are falling farther behind every second.
“I am, as it happens, in pursuit of the same fugitive, as so empowered by Information.”
In the mirror, his eyebrows tick upward a notch. He’s
probably never met an actual Information worker, and Mishima wonders what kind of reputation they have here. It all depends what interactive series, vids, and games have made it through the trade barriers and gained popularity. She hopes for, say, Cross-referencing the King, rather than something like Datasifters! “Any way you can prove your affiliation?”
She lets her superiority tick up a notch. “What do you think, we carry ID cards? If I can get on Information, I can prove it easily enough.” She hears the brassy edge to her voice: too close to desperation, but hopefully he can’t read her that well. She pushes on to cover it. “Let me help you. Show me a map, and we can try to figure out where he’s gone.”
“Maybe you’re just trying to sell out your coconspirator, make him the fall guy,” the cop suggests. “Or maybe this is all part of the plan, and you’re leading me into an ambush.”
She’s going to have to lead him by the nose the whole way if she’s going to get anything done here. “Come on, kid, use your brain. You’ve got me tied up back here; you lose nothing by working with me. And if we catch this guy, you’ll be able to figure out whether he knows me or not.”
Silence for a moment, then he pushes a button, and a map—a hardwired map, not Information—appears in front of her. Another button and a pulsing dot appears on it, presumably their current location. “Well?”
Mishima looks at the map and unfocuses, tapping into her distended sense for narrative and waiting for a pattern or a plot to become apparent to her.
“You guys don’t have an extradition treaty with RépubliqueLéman. Hell, you don’t even like them. So, what are you doing tracking a criminal for them?” She answers herself before he can. “You like criminals even less, especially violent ones hiding in your territory, disturbing the order. That’s why you’re a party to international criminal and judicial information-sharing agreements. This escape has obviously been carefully planned, so the perp knows that, too. He came in here to get off camera for a while. A change of disguise, maybe a meeting with a sponsor or supervisor, and then back out again, probably in a different centenal with laxer security and less restrictive laws.” The Swiss map is blank beyond the nation’s borders, but at least it names the neighboring centenals. “My guess is ForzaItalia, the closer of the two. It won’t take long to get to, and they’re easy on those wanted elsewhere.”
The cop grunts, and starts muttering into his earpiece, too low for her to parse. Then he steps on the gas without turning on the lights. Mishima doesn’t quite relax, but she does let herself be soothed by the quiet shades of darkness speeding by with smooth alacrity.
About thirty minutes later, and roughly halfway to the border with the westernmost ForzaItalia centenal, the cop’s earpiece chirps, and he lets out something like a guffaw or a cough, mutters into it, and then glances at the backseat, not using the mirror this time. “This car is armored, but better be ready to duck.”
Mishima meets his gaze with one eyebrow up but gives him a nod. There is nothing for the next couple of miles, and she thinks the cop spoke too soon. They took too long and they’ve missed all the action. But then she hears pops, individual at first, and then booms, and then rapid-fire bangs. The cop swings the steering wheel and they bounce off the road, thumping through a meadow and a couple of fields toward the noise and the lights.
They haven’t missed it. The Swiss cop, jawline twitching, takes them into the thick of the battle, right up to the front of the other police vehicles. His car has grenade launchers as well as armor, and there’s enough rattling and exploding going on for Mishima to think about taking cover. She stays low but keeps her eyes open, fixed on what she can make out of the target through the smoke and afterimages. It’s not a car but a concrete, pyramidal plinth of some kind—a monument, an old signpost—close against a sweep of rocky hillside, and the target appears to be tucked in between them. The Swiss cops—are they cops, she wonders, or some kind of military?—are playing it cautiously, laying down a heavy fire to both sides and announcing repeatedly over both analog and digital loudspeakers the moral and practical benefits of surrender. The fugitive is having none of it, and every thirty seconds or so, an explosive device shoots out from one side of the plinth or the other and bursts among the police circle. Based on the map still projected in the backseat, they are only a few kilometers away from the ForzaItalia border. It was a close thing; another half-hour and the bomber would have gotten away. He must have thought he was going to make it.
“What are you doing here?” Mishima asks when there’s enough of a lull so that she doesn’t have to yell.
“It’s not clear to you?”
“The perp didn’t walk here from the RépublicaHelvetiorum border. Someone dropped him. And that, son, is the person you want to talk to.”
The cop twists around in his seat to look at her. “You’re not used to being arrested, are you?”
Before Mishima can answer, the car jerks back in the midst of an enormous noise, rocking onto its side as a bomb explodes in its undercarriage. A whoosh of flame presses against the windows inches from Mishima’s eyes and the car wobbles and collapses, the world swinging giddily upside-down. When Mishima regains coherent thought, the vehicle is still shaking back and forth, there is a roaring against the window, and she can hear the tap-tap-tap-tap of plastic bullets against the chassis, but the glass is uncracked and the armor seems to be holding.
“Do you have a problem with plastic firearms here?” she asks, wondering if this is a normal situation for them.
The cop grunts. “Not usually this bad.” He looks around, moving only his eyes. “My fucking car.” Both he and Mishima are in exactly the positions they were when the bomb hit, frozen in place by the sprung safety webs, but outside of the armored bubble of the passenger compartment, his car is shredded.
* * *
The casualties from the attack tick up to seven, and mortality tables for the centenal where it happened and the centenals of each of the victims pop up in Ken’s vision. He appreciates how Information attaches the mortality probabilities so that everyone can see there is no change whatsoever in what you are most likely to die from. In RépubliqueLéman, the top cause of death is still cigarette-related illness; in the two Heritage centenals of Geneva (where most of the victims were from), it’s still heart disease. Terrorism doesn’t make the top ten list in any one of them, but Information is going to have its hands full annotating that data into every news update for the next week.
* * *
Being almost blown up seems to have created a rapport, and once they’re extricated from the car, the cop cuts off Mishima’s elasties, although he does seat her in the secure rear of an unharmed vehicle a little farther from the action, so she can’t just walk away. A few minutes later, he comes back with a mug of something hot, a local herbal infusion, from the smell of it. Mishima takes a sniff but, in the absence of Information to identify it for her, uses it exclusively to warm her hands.
“What are those things, anyway?” she asks, to make conversation.
The cop looks around at the matching pyramids looming out of the night at regular intervals. Mishima is expecting something about ancient superstitions and ghostly rituals, but the cop’s voice is prosaic, even if his answer is not. “Dragon’s teeth,” he says. “Supposed to stop tanks and airplanes from landing, that sort of thing. Odd for this one to be so close to the hill, but maybe that was tossed up in the earthquake of forty-five.” There’s another explosion, and they both duck instinctively. “I’ll be back,” he says, shutting the door before Mishima can get in a snarky remark about Swiss isolationism.
It has been clear to Mishima for a while that the bomber is determined to go out in a blaze of glory, and she can’t figure out anything that will prevent that, so she lets herself half-doze in the backseat of the police car until it happens.
The door across from her opens, and the cop sits down next to her. Mishima thinks reflexively of her stiletto. She must be more worn out than she thought. She reminds
herself that he’s not her enemy, at least not yet.
“Done?” she asks.
“Done,” he confirms. “In fact, looks like he was killed at least twenty minutes ago. He rigged it to keep tossing explosives at us after he couldn’t anymore.”
A bloody night, Mishima thinks. “Has anyone gone after the car that got him here? It’s got a head start, but there can’t be that many out on these roads this late at night. You guys do have some cameras on the road, right?”
“Already in process.” A glance, possibly friendlier than previous ones. “Tell me again how I can confirm your story, or your identity, or any of it.”
“Just get me close enough to the border to get on Information,” Mishima says, feigning weariness. “Or get on yourself and look me up.”
He harrumphs, but after a moment’s consideration, he rolls down his window, reaches up, and, to Mishima’s fascination, unfolds an antenna on the roof. “Try it now,” he says.
She blinks and it’s all there, everything the world knows about itself. She battens down her relief and only allows herself a quick glance at messages (Ken saying “WHAT?”; another from him with more details about the bombing; yet another saying he’s got news compilers focused on the suspect and that no one is looking at her yet) before she gets down to business. She opens a verifier page, lets it scan her, and then whispers the projection up in front of the cop. He takes his time examining it. To plug any lingering doubts, and because the insouciance of her current persona seems to demand it, Mishima opens up some moderately classified intel about the Swiss police: this particular officer’s name and complete file.
“So, you know that much, do you?” asks Donath Cashen. “I always figured.” He shakes his head. “Must say I’m glad we’re not a part of it.”
Mishima lets her amusement show. “You don’t know what you’re missing. But while we’re on the subject, let’s keep some secrets, shall we?”